Ahhhh, I remember reading 'Transcendental Miserablism' quite a few months ago--didn't make the connection between this and Vim's linked article. I actually sympathized with a couple of his points in TM, but this other article was full of strange contradictions.
We all know that I am all in favor of a "strict constructionist"-style reading of Deleuze, and find it extremely silly when people try to twist such obviously anti-capitalist strategies and goals into anything but. Why would you want to use the deterritorialization of market structures to *accelerate* a descent into "chaos" if you believe those structures to be positive or "vital" forces?
Weirdly contradictory.
There was a thread last year that addressed this very mis-appropriation of Deleuzian terms - and by none other than Vim's fave country, Israel's IDF: The
IDF's Use of Theory as Warfare.
This further example of capitalism's 'worldless' reappropriation of otherwise revolutionary dynamics now takes on black-comic side-effects. Like Freud's nephew raiding his ideas for manipulative marketing and PR purposes, in order to 'conceptualize' the IDF urban warfare against the Palestinians, the IDF military academies regularly refer to Deleuze and Guattari, to
Thousand Plateaux, but emptying it out, using it as a thoroughly depoliticized "operational theory" - the catch-phrases most often invoked include "Formless Rival Entities", "Fractal Manoeuvre", "Velocity vs. Rhythms", "The Wahabi War Machine", "Postmodern Anarchists", and "Nomadic Terrorists". One of the key distinctions they rely on is the one between "smooth" and "striated" space, which reflect the organizational concepts of the "war machine" and the "state apparatus". The IDF now often uses the term "to smooth out space" when they want to refer to an operation in a space as if it had no curvature, limits, or borders. Palestinian territories are redefined as "striated" because they are bounded by fences, walls, ditches, road blocks and so on.
As Eyal Weizman describes such dementia, in
Israeli Military Using Post-Structuralism as 'Operational Theory, "The attack conducted by units of the IDF on the city of Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, as "inverse geometry", which he explained as "the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions". During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of overground tunnels carved out through a dense and contiguous urban structure. Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were manoeuvring simultaneously in the city, they were so "saturated" into the urban fabric that very few would have been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city's streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as "infestation", seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. The IDF's strategy of "walking through walls" involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare "a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux"."
The insight to be drawn from all of this twisted gibberish is not, of course, the nonsensical allegation of Deleuze and Guattari as 'theorists' of a Zionist-militaristic colonialism - but the conclusion that the conceptual machine articulated by Deleuze and Guattari, far from being
ruggedly "subversive" or impervious to logistical sanitization, can also be 'adapted' to such warped pragmatism, to the military, social, economic, and ideologico-political operational mode of late capitalism.
